I went to #thingscamp4

I spent most of Saturday at #thingscamp4 hosted by Martin Howitt, Lucy Knight and Simon Gough. It was ace, as most things with "camp" in the title are (except GruesomeMutilationCamp of course, which I tend to avoid). I was glad to see they got some money from UKGovCamp as well as helping to evolve the agenda setting process.

I say "most of Saturday" but I arrived just before lunch and left at 5pm, so it was more like the biggest single thing I did on Saturday. But of course it was not one single thing at all, but many interesting conversations and processes.

Of the sessions, I sat in on the IoT 101 bit as long as I needed to be satisfied that my 101 knowledge was covered. It's so tricky with that sort of thing, because it's a huge subject and as soon as you start to talk about examples, the conversation can quickly get diverted into the details of the example rather than covering everything, but Chris Hunt did a grand job.

Then I went into the session on finding Parking Spaces. I don't have a lot to contribute, as a non-driver and all round individual-car-curmudgeon. Broadly paraphrased, the subject was "What decentralised ways might there be to help me find a parking space when I drive into a large town or city" The bit of the conversation I heard was a bit more centralised than I'd expected, mostly what data local authorities have and why it's really hard and a quick trot through some of the ideas that haven't worked (eg mobile phone accelerometers that interpret all forms of rapid motion as driving, sensors that get frozen etc).

I stayed in my seat for the change of session to talking about making a mesh network out of a little device called microbit - we had three and only an emergent understanding of what a "mesh network" is or how we would demonstrate that we'd achieved it. One of the Michaels (sorry didn't get details) plugged in first and hacked this code together, which two of us copied so that we had three microbits talking to each other at least.

When you press one of the buttons it listens for the others saying "Hello" and replies with "Received" - the word get spelled out on its LED display and then they kept going, so basically, we had one card at a time saying "Received" and then another one would say it and then the other and so on. We didn't get to understand why it kept repeating or really have a good idea of what was actually going on. It was hacky like that. But fun to work in a quick, collaborative way with a bunch of people.

I listened a little to a final session about voice activation and accessibility, but then I also got distracted by a message from the real world and had to go off to attend to that.

I also had a nice conversation with Rob Miller from Hackney Council bonding over the ridiculousness of performance measurement in Local Government and sat staring at some code that he couldn't find an error in, pointing unhelpfully while struggling to read the screen.

So all good, I learned something, helped someone and met some new people. Hurrah for ThingsCamp!